Flood disaster in Libya: Warning of dam collapse

Corruption, wars and political conflicts. Many factors contributed to the city of Derna succumbing to extreme “Daniel” weather, experts say.

Extreme weather “Daniel” swept the Libyan coast on Sunday and Monday, causing the collapse of two dams. Experts estimate that 30 million cubic meters of water flooded the city.

according to Red CrescentRed CrescentIn many Islamic countries, the Red Crescent is the official designation of the Red Cross. More than 11,000 people were confirmed dead after the disaster.

The city’s mayor fears that up to 20,000 people may have lost their lives The amounts of water washed away entire neighborhoods.

Rescue teams are currently combing the streets and ruins, searching for the dead and survivors

The news agency described that the wall of water was several floors high, crushing residential buildings and drowning entire families within minutes AP.

They interviewed Fadlallah, who stated that he had lost 13 family members. His dead relatives come from a neighborhood near the river valley.

– He says: No one expected this.

Their bodies were recovered by the Red Crescent, and their names are on the list of confirmed dead sent among relief crews, the Associated Press wrote.

Fadlallah tells the AP that he still does not know what happened to about 20 family members.

Muhammad Derna (34 years old) told the news agency that he fled with his family and his neighbor to the second floor when the wave came. Outside, horrific scenes unfolded. He saw women and children being swept away by the wave.

They shouted, “Help, help.” He adds that it was like a Hollywood horror movie AP.

Although the extreme weather that swept the world this summer is to blame for the disaster, experts believe Al Jazeera We’ve talked about the fact that other factors may help explain why the range is widening.

Neglect and lack of maintenance of vital infrastructure in Libya is an important factor in explaining why dams burst and flooded the city, says Anas Al-Qamati, who heads the Libyan Sadiq Research Institute. For Al Jazeera channel.

He and other experts point to war, corruption and political conflicts.

• Libya is currently led by two competing “governments” – one internationally recognized and based in Tripoli, and the other based in Benghazi and supported by the country’s parliament. Presidential elections planned for 2021 did not take place.

– It also involves a lot of arguments about money. In the past three years, the country has had no development budget, Claudia Gazzini of the International Crisis Group tells Al Jazeera.

• In the coastal city of Derna, where the disaster occurred, the situation has been unstable for several years. The city was known as the cultural capital of Libya before ISIS took control of it in 2014. In 2015, they were expelled.
• Three years later, General Khalifa Haftar took power On power in the city. This happened after a two-year siege, bombs and heavy fighting on the ground, Al Jazeera wrote.

The dams in Derna are among the infrastructure that suffered from this. The city’s deputy mayor, Ahmed Madroud, had previously said that it had not been properly maintained since 2002.

Corrosion in dams in the city of Derna is not a new thing. They have been warned about them repeatedly, including in scientific articles, but no one cared, Hani Shennib, who works for an organization that wants to improve relations between the United States and Libya, tells Al Jazeera.

in a report From Omar Al-Mukhtar University last year, Al Jazeera warned that something had to be done about the dams quickly, and that there was a “high potential for flood risk.”

The population of Derna is about 100,000 people, and it is located on a riverbed 900 kilometers east of the capital, Tripoli.

– People have lost everything. Ahmed Bayram of the Norwegian Refugee Council said earlier this week that 25 percent of the city had been completely destroyed.

He spoke to VG by phone from Tunisia, where the aid organization is coordinating its work in Libya, and described the desperate situation:

Infrastructure is destroyed, the mobile phone network is down, and electricity is out.

– There is no clean water or sufficient medical equipment. People have no places to live. He added that homeless children wander the streets filled with corpses.